Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Wigmore Hall review - family fun, fire and finesse

I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’ stupendous talent and technique – their manifold achievements speak for themselves – but about the popular idea that family connections make for closer, more cohesive music-making. 

Well, the more fool me. Sheku’s delighted little glances back to his sister at the keyboard as he waited for her opening notes in a movement or a work hinted at the solid but playful rapport, and rippling empathy, that bound the quartet of fairly disparate pieces they played. Indeed, fans in search of definitive statements from the cello-and-piano repertoire might have concluded that this concert happened the wrong way round. 

Two substantial opening works – the first sonatas of both Mendelssohn and Fauré – yielded after the interval to an engaging new piece written for the siblings by Natalie Klouda, and Poulenc’s skittish, mercurial “Sonata for cello and piano” from 1948. Yet this insistence on a variety of contrasting flavours, and refusal to trudge up to some heavyweight declaration at the close, nicely suited the mood of congenial, and collegial, intimacy. If this felt like relaxed, family-oriented Hausmusik (and of course the Mendelssohn connection threw a bridge of sibling collaboration across time) then few houses come equipped with such an array of gifts.

Among the many signs of the siblings’s super-compatibility was a steady evenness in the dynamics that made their instruments equal partners at each stage. Neither ever occupied a back seat. From the opening notes of Mendelssohn’s allegro vivace, Isata (pictured below) staked her irrefutable claim as co-soloist, graceful and liquid in her touch but never afraid to be forthright and assertive. The molten, smoky warmth of Sheku’s tone hardly needs emphasis by now. Together, the duo lent the sonata a bloom and heft that made descriptions of its as a conventional, classical exercise in form feeling inadequate. 

Isata’s firm, ringing voice melded with her brother’s more wistful and plangent appeal, his vibrato always expressive but restrained. The andante sang out lusciously while, in the closing allegro assai, the piano’s thickened clusters of chords and dense passagework brought the fiery breath of a Beethovenian storm into the family salon. 

The first movement of Fauré’s late sonata (written in war-ravaged 1917) tested the pair’s interplay with its unsettled and restless rhythms. For a few moments, complete togetherness seemed to elude them – but then this piece bristles with a discomfited jaggedness, as the piano grasps at melodic fragments against the cello’s growling ostinatos. Consolatory, typically Fauré-esque beauties returned in the andante, as Isata’s bell-like chimes and runs offset Sheku’s sinuous legato lines. Driven forward with pulse and poise by Isata, the candour and freshness of the finale never quite mask a darkness beneath, with the cello part probing the depths. 

Natalie Klouda wrote Tor Mordôn for the siblings last year, as an evocation of two places that form part of the Kanneh-Mason family heritage: Antigua and Wales (specifically, the mountains of Eryri/Snowdonia). While I found it hard to hear the more directly programmatic aspects of the work in the music (eg both countries’ “powerful oral storytelling traditions”), the landscape-inspired mood-painting worked effectively in an idiom that Mendelssohn himself might have appreciated. Pastoral suggestions of birdsong, mist, rippling streams or surging seas in the first part (“flowing and expressive”) give way to a “con fuoco” climax in which a heavy-booted Stravinsky – or maybe Bartok – seems to have set up camp beside the Caribbean or the Irish Sea. 

Urgent pizzicato riffs from the cello and thunderous piano bass figures brought ancient volcanos to life and swept marine tempests across the landscape. The siblings’ exhilarated execution showed how they relished these updates on Romantic tradition. Those Stravinskian eruptions, and Bartok-ian rhythms, aside, Klouda’s Snowdonia might almost stand within hailing distance of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides. 

The final piece saw the weather change again. That sense of easy familial intimacy meant that Poulenc’s sonata made a fitting send-off for the siblings – even if some listeners might have wished for a mightier proof of their talents. But their bar-by-bar interaction served this quicksilver, shape-shifting work well. The super-responsive give-and-take between the pair matched Poulenc’s lurches from levity to gravity, sweetness to spikiness. After the strut and bounce of the Tempo di marcia opening, Sheku’s shadowed melancholia in the Cavatine, and Isata’s bluesy excursions, meant the work dodged the element of kitsch that Poulenc can sometime seems to court.

Jazzy dances, brilliantly coloured and dashingly phrased by Isata in the Ballabile section, then skipped into the zest and ingenuity of the finale, delivered by both with the right blend of wit, warmth and swagger. Heroic gestures can wait for another day, and another branch of the repertoire. Serious but never solemn, the duo’s unflagging musicality put a smile on the face, and a spring in the step. 

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